期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2010
卷号：107
期号：31
页码：13626-13630
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1001651107
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Flocking birds, fish schools, and insect swarms are familiar examples of collective motion that plays a role in a range of problems, such as spreading of diseases. Models have provided a qualitative understanding of the collective motion, but progress has been hindered by the lack of detailed experimental data. Here we report simultaneous measurements of the positions, velocities, and orientations as a function of time for up to a thousand wild-type Bacillus subtilis bacteria in a colony. The bacteria spontaneously form closely packed dynamic clusters within which they move cooperatively. The number of bacteria in a cluster exhibits a power-law distribution truncated by an exponential tail. The probability of finding clusters with large numbers of bacteria grows markedly as the bacterial density increases. The number of bacteria per unit area exhibits fluctuations far larger than those for populations in thermal equilibrium. Such "giant number fluctuations" have been found in models and in experiments on inert systems but not observed previously in a biological system. Our results demonstrate that bacteria are an excellent system to study the general phenomenon of collective motion.
关键词：swarming ; self-organization ; active suspensions
